Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Insisting that the delegate selection process is “corrupt and crooked,” Donald J. Trump offered a vivid example on Sunday to prove his point.
Imagine being wooed by Mr. Trump.
“Look, nobody has better toys than I do,” he told reporters at a hotel on Staten Island, where he pressed his case that the system was rigged against him. “I can put them in the best planes and bring them to the best resorts anywhere in the world.”
But Mr. Trump said that was unseemly.
“You’re basically buying these people,” he added. “You’re basically saying, ‘Delegate, listen, we’re going to send you to Mar-a-Lago on a Boeing 757, you’re going to use the spa, you’re going to this, you’re going to that, we want your vote.’ That’s a corrupt system.”
Mr. Trump’s comments were the latest salvo in an escalating war against the Republican National Committee over how delegates were being selected in the presidential race.
On Sunday, two days before New York’s primaries, Mr. Trump was the only Republican presidential candidate to campaign in the state, where polls showed him with a wide lead.
During his visit to Staten Island, a stronghold of his support, he accepted an award from the New York Veteran Police Association and spoke at a party brunch. At a rally in Poughkeepsie, he berated party officials once again...
George Clooney, who hosted big-money fundraisers for Hillary Clinton in California this weekend, has called such fundraising “obscene”.
In response Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s opponent for the Democratic nomination, said he respected Clooney’s “integrity and honesty on this issue” and added: “One of the great tragedies is that big money is buying elections.”
Clinton leads Sanders by double digits in most polls regarding New York, which stages its primary on Tuesday.
The issue of fundraising has been a constant on the campaign trail, as Sanders heralds his reliance on small donors and lack of any fundraising Super Pac. Clooney’s events, however, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, attracted criticism from the Sanders campaign and, on Friday in San Francisco, protests outside the venue.
Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, the actor was asked by host Chuck Todd whether the sums involved in his events, such as $353,400 a couple to be a “co-chair”, were, as critics and protesters have said, obscene.
“Yes,” he said. “I think it’s an obscene amount of money. I think – you know that we had some protesters last night when we pulled up in San Francisco and they’re right to protest, they’re absolutely right, it is an obscene amount of money...
BUCHANAN COUNTY, Va. — There isn’t much Jody Bostic believes in these days.
The government has abandoned him, he feels. Local coal mines have laid him off so many times he opened a T-shirt store to make a living. Big-city media treat him and his neighbors like know-nothings.
His remaining hope: Donald Trump will become president and use his business skills to bring jobs to this Appalachian mountain county. “Hey, in this county, things are going downhill. People are getting laid off. People are leaving,” says the 39-year-old former miner. “If Trump don’t get it, it will be another blow.”
Mr. Trump won Buchanan County with 69.7% of the vote in the March 1 Republican primary, the highest percentage vote he has collected in any U.S. county so far. A close look at the white, working-class enclave, which is in Virginia’s southwest, provides a clearer picture of why Mr. Trump inspires supporters and poses problems for anti-Trump GOP strategists.
Voters here say Mr. Trump understands their frustration and will fight the Washington establishment on their behalf. In an area awash in uncertainty—Will mines remain open? Will the river flood? Must the young leave to find work?—he is a reassuring presence, someone who has visited their living rooms for years via television.
Here, as elsewhere, his message of American renewal, closed borders and antigovernment populism resonates despite his brashness, even among Democrats.
His wealth isn’t a put-off. County Sheriff Ray Foster, who supports Mr. Trump, says rich businessmen have long been well-liked around the county because “they make jobs for the people here.”
As for the imbroglios over Mr. Trump’s comments about women and his shifting views on abortion and foreign policy, which have driven up his negative ratings in national polls, they are generally seen here as a plus. They reinforce his outsider status.
“He talks before he thinks,” Mr. Foster says, “so he doesn’t have time to think up something and lie to you.”
The lessons are important for New York, where Mr. Trump is heavily favored to win the primary on Tuesday and has a chance of peeling off working-class Democrats in the general election. He could do especially well in Republican strongholds along the state’s southern tier, federally classified as part of Appalachia. Counties there share some characteristics of Buchanan County.
In Buchanan County, Mr. Trump has won over many Democrats because he not only “speaks for them—he speaks in terms they’re comfortable with,” says Gerald Arrington, the county’s commonwealth’s attorney and a registered Democrat. Mr. Arrington says Mr. Trump won his vote in the Virginia primary, the first time he had cast a vote for a Republican...
The Supreme Court's last great case of the Obama era comes before the justices Monday when the administration's lawyers defend his plan to offer work permits to as many as 4 million immigrants who have been living here illegally for years.
Once again, lawyers for Republican leaders from Congress and the states will be challenging the actions of the Democratic president. And as with past battles over healthcare and same-sex marriage, Obama administration lawyers will need to win over at least one of the court's more conservative justices.
If the justices split 4 to 4 — a possibility since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia — the tie vote would keep in place a Texas judge's order that has blocked President Obama's deportation relief plan from taking effect.
At issue is whether the president has the power to extend a "temporary reprieve" from the threat of deportation and a work permit to immigrant parents of U.S. citizens or lawful residents. More than one-fourth of those who stand to benefit live in California, according to immigration experts.
The two sides disagree not only on what is the right outcome, but on what the case is about. One side sees a great constitutional clash over the rule of law in a democracy, while the other sees a narrow regulatory dispute.
The Republicans, in written briefs, portray Obama's order as a profound threat to the constitutional system. If the president can defy Congress and change the law on his own, the nation has abandoned "a bedrock constitutional principle," they say.
This "would be one of the largest changes in immigration policy in the nation's history," say lawyers for Texas and 25 other Republican-led states. They note that the president's action arose after Congress refused to change the law in line with his wishes, so the order rests on "an unprecedented, sweeping assertion of executive power," they say.
The House Republicans joined the case on the side of Texas, and if anything, raised the stakes even higher. They described Obama's immigration order as "the most aggressive of executive power claims" and a threat to "the separation of powers that underpins our very constitutional structure."
Meanwhile, U.S. Solicitor Gen. Donald Verrilli Jr., the administration's top lawyer, sought to play down the significance of Obama's order and defuse the constitutional clash. He said the immigrants who qualify would be offered a temporary relief from deportation that does not "confer any form of legal status." He cited instances in which Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush gave similar relief to large groups of immigrants who were fleeing wars or despotic regimes.
UC Davis contracted with consultants for at least $175,000 to scrub the Internet of negative online postings following the November 2011 pepper-spraying of students and to improve the reputations of both the university and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, newly released documents show.
The payments were made as the university was trying to boost its image online and were among several contracts issued following the pepper-spray incident.
Some payments were made in hopes of improving the results computer users obtained when searching for information about the university or Katehi, results that one consultant labeled “venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the chancellor.”
Others sought to improve the school’s use of social media and to devise a new plan for the UC Davis strategic communications office, which has seen its budget rise substantially since Katehi took the chancellor’s post in 2009. Figures released by UC Davis show the strategic communications budget increased from $2.93 million in 2009 to $5.47 million in 2015.
“We have worked to ensure that the reputation of the university, which the chancellor leads, is fairly portrayed,” said UC Davis spokeswoman Dana Topousis. “We wanted to promote and advance the important teaching, research and public service done by our students, faculty and staff, which is the core mission of our university.”
Money to pay the consultants came from the communications department budget, Topousis said.
*****
IT IS ONE MORE EXAMPLE OF HOW OUT OF TOUCH THE LEADERSHIP AT UC DAVIS IS WHEN IT COMES TO THEIR PUBLIC PERSPECTIVE...
As the news rippled across the web last week that a Long Island student had won admission to all eight Ivy League universities, thousands of people reacted with messages of praise.
But when Peter Kang, a high school senior in Chantilly, Va., saw a New York Times article last week about the student, Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna, on his Facebook feed, he grumbled.
“This is exactly what is driving down college acceptance rates and making university that much harder to get into,” he wrote on the site, setting off a lively discussion in the comment thread.
The crux of Mr. Kang’s complaint, one shared by many other students, is that he and his peers are applying to too many colleges, driving down admission rates and elevating the prestige of selective universities, which leads more students to apply.
“It just seems like a vicious cycle,” Mr. Kang, 17, said in an interview.
Admissions experts say Mr. Kang has a point.
Mr. Kang blamed the Common Application, the standardized form that has risen in popularity and is now accepted by more than 600 colleges, including all the Ivy League universities. The ease of using the form has led many students to decide almost on a whim to add one, two or even 10 more universities to their list.
Mr. Kang admitted that he, too, chose to “blast send” his applications. He felt as if he had to. “I was one of those people that took advantage of the system,” he said.
He applied to 21 colleges, all but two through the Common Application, and won acceptance to six. All the Ivy League campuses to which he applied rejected him.
The experience left him deflated, though despite his critique, he said he was happy for Ms. Uwamanzu-Nna (pronounced oo-wah-man-ZOO-nah), a child of Nigerian immigrants.
“She did the same exact thing I did and she got the results, but I can’t be mad at someone trying to improve their odds,” he said. “It’s so much easier to apply and there’s so much pressure to apply.”
Admissions experts point to a trend called application inflation. Students are sending off more applications than ever. In 1990, just 9 percent of students applied to seven or more schools, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. By 2013, that group had grown to 32 percent.
For the first time in five years, Northern California’s rivers are roaring and its reservoirs are filled almost to the brim.
But you’d hardly know it, based on how quiet it’s been at the two giant pumping stations at the south end of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The pumps deliver Sacramento Valley water to 19 million Southern Californians and millions of acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley.
While precipitation has been roughly four times heavier than a year ago, the Delta pumps have produced just a 35 percent increase in water shipments. For every gallon that’s been pumped to south-of-Delta water agencies since Jan. 1, 3 1/2 gallons have been allowed to flow out to sea. Pumping activity has decreased considerably the past three weeks, to the rising irritation of south state contractors.
The reason lies in a combination of poor timing, the drought-ravaged status of several endangered species of Delta fish, a suite of environmental laws and regulations that govern the pumps – and the complexities of the Delta’s intricate network of river channels, canals and sloughs. As regulators have taken extraordinary steps to protect nearly extinct fish species, their decisions to restrict pumping have become another flash point in California’s water wars – one that shows the easing of the drought doesn’t calm the fighting over how water gets allocated.
Congress has weighed in, with House Republicans and California’s senior Democratic senator pushing for more pumping. In Sacramento, federal and state bureaucracies are butting heads in response to competing demands on the Delta’s water.
On one side are the California Department of Water Resources, which operates the State Water Project, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which runs the federal government’s Central Valley Project. These agencies oversee the state’s vast network of dams, pumps and canals, and they are under pressure from their south-of-Delta customers to help replenish groundwater reserves and south state reservoirs that have shrunk after four years of drought.
On the other side are two federal agencies responsible for safeguarding Delta fish protected by the Endangered Species Act: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service. Court rulings empower the agencies to govern Delta water flows, which often translate into pumping limits to keep fish from being harmed.
“This year we saw the fishery agencies, particularly the Fish and Wildlife Service, make more conservative calls,” said Mark Cowin, director of the Department of Water Resources. “My sense is they felt compelled to take every conservative action they could ... to try to prevent extinction.” He said his agency has engaged in “spirited conversations” with the fisheries agencies about their determinations this year.
Many of the water agencies that depend on the Delta pumps say the restrictions are based on faulty science and harming the economy.
“The state will never recover from this water shortage, if they keep operating (the pumps) the way they have been this first three months of the year,” said Johnny Amaral, deputy general manager for Westlands Water District, an influential San Joaquin Valley farm-water contractor. Westlands has been told to expect just a 5 percent water allocation this year from the Central Valley Project.
